63 posts categorized "Immigration, Population, Aging, and Demography"

November 04, 2016

Recently naturalized immigrants have the ability influence voting outcomes in several key states, including Florida, Nevada, Virginia, and Arizona. The researchers at the University of Southern California Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII) released a report, titled Rock the (Naturalized) Vote II, which builds upon findings that CSII published in 2012. In that report, researchers highlighted the link between populations that had a high recently-naturalized population and voting trends.

For instance, in the 2012 Presidential election, Obama won with 71% of the Latin@/x vote, and 73% of the Asian vote. At that time, roughly 25% of all Latin@s/x and 66% of all Asians were naturalized citizens. Part of this support came with the passage of the Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Undocumented individuals who were brought to the U.S. as children can apply for DACA. This allows a two-year, renewable, protection from deportation, and grants work authorization. Over the last four years, 728,000 undocumented immigrants have been awarded DACA status. According to a report by Migration Policy Institute, although DACA does not provide an avenue for citizenship, it has improved employment, earnings, educational attainment, and social integration. Although immigrants with DACA are ineligible to vote (as they do not have citizenship), this population, particularly among Latin@s/x, is linked through social and political networks to peers who can vote.

How might a high recently-naturalized population influence the presidential election in 2016?

October 24, 2016

If I had two minutes with the presidential candidates, I would ask for one thing: the Reauthorization of the 1965 Older Americans Act.

As a former Director of an Area Agency on Aging, I bore witness to the health disparities suffered by our rural, aging population, particularly their need for nutrition assistance, in home aid, incontinence management, medical transportation, adequate housing, and medication assistance.

Can you imagine being trapped in your home simply because you do not have a ramp to get in and out of your home? Can you imagine being on a waitlist for food assistance and the impact it has on an individuals’ emotional and physical well being? Can you imagine having to make the decision about whether to take medication for diabetes or use the money to eat or pay rent?

August 04, 2016

I thought I was going to write this post about Brexit and the growing anti-immigration sentiment around the world. I was planning to draw a parallel between the recent referendum in Britain to leave the European Union with some of the isolationist sentiments we hear from Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump about building a wall to keep out Mexicans and barring all Muslims from entering the United States. For further context, I was going to discuss the growing nationalist surge that is enveloping much of Europe. That was my initial plan.

May 25, 2016

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released a report on suicide rates, finding that suicides in the United States had increased by 24 percent between 1999 and 2014. Like most people, I learned of this report after reading upsetting headlines about this increase. My local newspaper, the Los Angeles Times reported that "US Suicides Have Soared Since 1999."

As sociologists, we learn to look at the original data to get the real story beyond the headlines. What do the data tell us? Is it the same story as being told in news reports?

May 05, 2016

You might have heard the phrase "aging population" and thought, wait a minute, isn't every living thing aging? What does it mean to say that a population is aging?

Demographers study the composition of populations, including its age structure. Demographers use population pyramids to create a graphic depiction of a country's age structure. In a "normal" pyramid, the base is wider (representing infants and children) and gradually narrows at the top; as people get older and die, they essentially leave the population.

December 11, 2015

In a recent conversation with colleagues, we talked about the various ways we describe age. Whether it’s young, old, middle-age, wise, or (im)mature. I realized that I’m somewhere between feeling not really young, but also not quite middle-aged. This conversation, coupled with some recent medical issues that I’ve been contending with, has gotten me thinking about time, death, and my own mortality.

For me, the two scariest parts of dying are 1) the thought of not existing anymore (this has kept me up at night for hours, particularly during bouts of insomnia and high stress) and 2) not knowing how everything turns out. Humans have pondered question 1 forever. What is death? What does it mean to cease existing? Is there an afterlife? Have I fully lived?

November 12, 2015

I winced the second she said it. My 73-year-old cousin asked the server in a Vietnamese restaurant, “Where are you from?” Now, aside from the good chance that the family of a waitress in a Vietnamese restaurant was at one point from Vietnam, I had to interject: “She could be from South Carolina.”

My 73-year-old cousin had good intentions; of course, she is a friendly person who is interested in people. I had to slowly explain effect of being asked, “Where are you from?” repeatedly could have the unintended consequence of alienating someone, rendering someone like our server a “forever foreigner.”

April 24, 2015

Earlier this year, several news organizations reported on a study that found that homes near a Starbucks increased in value at a rate higher than others during a fifteen year period. Did Starbucks cause this larger rise in home values?

This story caught my eye for a number of reasons. While I’m not a coffee drinker, a new Starbucks just opened down the street (okay, about two miles down the street, so not that close) but if its presence further increased our home values that would be a plus. But more to the point, it drew my attention as a sociologist. The headlines seem to confuse causation with correlation, assuming that one variable had a direct impact on the other, rather than coinciding with a number of other factors that come along with the decision to open a new Starbucks.

January 13, 2015

When you think of inequality what comes to mind? As sociologists, many of us are trained to immediately point to the “holy trinity” of sociological analysis: race, gender, and class. We may think of the achievement gap in education, the gender pay gap, the extreme disparity between CEO pay and average worker pay, or toxic or environmental injustice as some of the typical manifestations of inequality. There is no denying the importance of race, class, and gender to any discussion of social stratification. However, there is another dimension of inequality that is arguably more pernicious than the holy trinity but is not spoken about nearly as much: the country in which you were born.

November 17, 2014

As a college professor, my students are almost always the same age—with a few outliers—but I continue to get older, which occasionally becomes more salient. Recently we screened the documentary The Central Park Five in our department, a film focusing on the attack on a jogger in 1989 and the subsequent rush to judgment that led to the wrongful imprisonment of five teen boys. The incident took place when I was a college student living in New York, and before most of the students in attendance were born. When we talked about the film, they were just as interested in hearing more about what it was actually like to be alive in the 1980s, as though I were a visitor from another era.

Admittedly, even I was struck by how old the hairstyles, clothes, and cars appeared in the documentary and I marveled at how quickly time can pass by. While focusing on the day-to-day challenges of everyday life, it’s easy to overlook the passage of big chunks of time until others point it out.